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Re-visiting the North Denver re-zoning battle

Susan Shepherd supporters, like Dan Markofsky have taken to bashing the North Denver News. It’s worth remembering where Shepherd’s supporters have been on past issues. This from 2008:

With an overflowing city council chambers, two measures to re-zone North Denver neighbors for single family homes ended their nearly two-year odyssey. With the pace of scrape-offs increasing on what seems to be a weekly basis, the Denver City Council began two public hearings to consider keeping two areas of West Highland and Sloan’s Lake predominantly single family, or too allow scrape-offs for the construction of duplexes and triplexes. The public hearings began at 6:30 pm and concluded at 2:15 a.m. in the morning. When the council finally passed both measures by 11-2 margins, the clock had struck 3:15 a.m.

The 11-2 margin was misleading. A legal protest meant that the council had to pass the re-zonings with ten votes, and with two staunch opponents, Councilwoman Jeanne Faatz and Councilman Charlie Brown, the opponents had only to garner two votes to scuttle the proposals. With tough questions from the council as a whole, and significant discomfort with the process and the potentially adverse impacts upon some property owners, as the evening stretched beyond midnight into the early morning, tension mounted and the outcome was is doubt.

The passage means more than fewer scrapeoffs in two limited areas of North Denver. The vote was a repudiation of a planning board that rejected the rezonings overwhelmingly and that many critics see as a tilted in favor of developers and less than committed to concept of neighborhood stability at the core of Blueprint Denver. For neighborhoods across the city that have been working on small area plans, the rezonings represent a victory and a renewed commitment to Blueprint Denver by the city council. The rezonings presage a fight over a massive zoning plan update effort that will likely have similar impacts across Denver. And not insignificantly, the passage are a bittersweet victory for North Denver’s councilman Rick Garcia, who has been at the center of a storm over scrape-offs and the city’s response for three years.

Initially, in private, Garcia had rejected the mandatory rezonings in principal, holding that the change in development rights of individual property owners was too great a burden. But Garcia agonized over the changes that neighbors were facing, particularly on blocks where multiple scrapeoffs were transforming the essential character of the area and subjecting neighbors to impacts and lessening the salability of their own properties. Garcia was working hard on a compromise solution to the very end, pushing proponents and opponents into mediation, and twice amending the bills to give property owners more time to act with their own properties. The final form of the measure gives property owners to the end of the year to pursue development, and existing multi-unit buildings are fully protected, the results of a broader bill just passed by the Council, both essential compromises pushed by Garcia. In the end, however, Garcia pushed the rezonings to a council vote. Pointedly, as Garcia’s colleagues noted, he did not lobby them on measures so key to his own district, acknowledging that the issue was a watershed one for the city and the conflicting, substantive interests ultimately at play in any broad change of residential zoning.

For the proponents, including the principal applicants, neighborhood activists Jude Aiello and Steve Kite, the evening marked the end of a two-year struggle in which success often seemed impossible. For the opponents, which included many from the neighborhoods as well developers with money at stake, the defeat seemed a surprise. They had put much stock in technical legal arguments offered by Dan Markofsky, issues that seemed to little impact upon the city council or their attorneys.

What City Councilman Paul Lopez called “the Fourth of July, early,” the debate was marked by empassioned testimony on both sides, some good arguments and some legal sophistry. Nearly eighty people signed up to testify on the measures, and necessarily, some of the testimony was repetitive and often off-topic. Many opponents of the downzoning, particularly some who were not even effected directly, brought in issues entirely ungermane- the plight of the developmentally disabled, the water source for Sloan’s Lake, and neighborhood concerns far distant from zoning. Many realtors and developers, not from North Denver, testified. They were balanced by neighborhood activists from groups across the city who recognized the bellweather nature of fulfiling Blueprint Denver’s promise of protecting neighborhoods.

It began with the city’s Community Planning and Development department’s recommendation of the rezoning. Peter Park, the city’s head of planning and development, lauded his staff’s efforts, saying the zoning proposals met “all of the criteria for review and consideration. He called the existing zoning of a “mismatch with Blueprint Denver, the city’s master plan.” Park said the issue boiled down to keeping a single family neighborhood from becoming a multifamily one.

Diedre Oss, the city staffer who has worked upon the rezoning said the areas were over 80% single family detached homes (the West Highland area in question is 87% single family homes), the core reason planning and zoning recommended the rezonings to preserve character of the neighborhoods.

Oss said that under ultimate buildout conditions, an additional 134 zone lots could expand, being the potential addition of 134 new duplexes and tri-plexes in the area. Under the rezonings, it is anticipated that only 5 lots could be so developed. That would reduce single family home to just 37%, what Oss termed a “threat to the neighborhood.” Oss said that

R-1 zoning effectively preserved the neighborhood, and quoted Blueprint Denver as saying that “areas of stability are overzoned.” “The most effective approach is to reduce zone district development capacity,” said Oss in recommending that Council pass the measure.

The testimony stretched on for hours. Opponent Markofsky (currently an attorney with Feldmann Nagel, LLC and builder of scrapeoff triplex ruinous of the neighborhood character) argued that the zoning application was not complete, the a listing of owners was flawed. Christa Chisholm said the rezoning “isn’t going to fix the ugly home on the neighborhood. South Denver architect Peter Pappas said that debate was about the future, and that change did not represent “a threat to the neighborhood.” Dan Hoops, a long-time opponent attacked the process rhetorically, “is this how you recommend plans be created? ”

Proponents attacked the size and form of the new duplexes. Dan Cooper said the new structures fit the neighborhood like galoshes on a duck. April Butler called the neighborhood “truly under seige. Four homes demolished on her block were replaced with ten units, with victorian and Arts and Crafts bungalows being bulldozed. Elizabeth Wheeler sited the 139 single family homes already demolished in North Denver, and count that grows weekly, and channeled her Italian immigrant grandmother with “Basta!” -enough. Many multi-generation neighborhood residents decried the scrapeoffs. Steve Kite urged the Council to “keep the commitments of Blueprint Denver.” John Lanternman, a planner and consultant to developers, called the neighborhood a beautiful symphony, marred by discordant notes, “multifamily development… eroding the existing character” of the area.

Area realtors clashed on the proposal. George and Betty Luce of Nostaglic Homes said “not all realtors are against neighbors,” and Betty Luce produced home sales data that showed home pricing in R-1 areas outpacing that in R-2, arguing that downzoning could actually increase home values. Opposed was Realtor Kathleen Genereux, who built one of the most criticized duplexes directly on Sloan Lake, and has been a consistent supporter of the scrapeoff potential of R-2 zoning.

In the end, however, the council sided with the proponents, apparently moved by the argument that protecting the existing mix of homes in the neighborhoods with rezoning fulfilled the spirit and letter of Blueprint Denver. Despite charges from Councilman Charlie Brown that the planning department hadn’t been fair, the lengthly process, to agreed to be flawed, seemed to convince a majority of the council that rezoning was critical in protecting two “predominantly” single family neighborhoods.

With opponents threatening lawsuits, the matter may be far from settled. But the public phase of the debate, as tortured as it has been, has been closed.

Editor’s note: The North Denver News hosted a town hall meeting on the rezonings nearly two years ago, at which a compromise measure of voluntary zoning was discussed and supported by many on both sides on the debate. That compromise was eventually rejected by city planner’s as unworkable, spurring the contentious, years long battle over rezoning. Our efforts as a community stakeholder to help with a compromise then, and our reporting since, has been mischaracterized by many, particularly some who were interested in demonizing the proponents of rezoning. While the rezonings as passed are imperfect and have significant downsides, the issues about the future of North Denver have been surfaced in a compelling way. We fervently hope that opponents and proponents can find common ground in the future, to advance both the preservation and improvement of our neighborhoods.